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Whatever is broken -
fix lead management first!
Marketing starts by finding or generating an
interest in your solution.
Selling ends with collecting revenue from a
customer. Between these two events in the marketing
and sales process is a chain of interlinked
processes that convert interest into revenue.
Like any chain, it is only as strong as its
weakest link. Here are some opinions on how to
find and fix your weak links.
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"up to 80 per cent of the leads you pass to
Sales fall through the cracks" American
Marketing Association1
“more than 70% [of leads]
are never acted on because they do not reach the
right person or organization at the right time”.
Gartner2 |
Lead
management can be the savior because it gives
you the management information to:
 | Find any broken links
and fix them. |
| Continuously control
quality and expense-to-revenue ratios. |
| Manage your pipeline to
match the needs of the business. |
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Choose where you want
to go with lead management |
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Click here to see the
difficulties
and why it often fails
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Click here to bypass the
problems and go straight to a solution
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What's the problem? |
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Like time management or
dieting or regular exercise, lead management is
very easy to talk about in theory and very
difficult to do - everyday for the rest of
your life! Just like resolutions to "lose
weight" or "get regular exercise" most people
who set out to "do thorough lead management"
fail to maintain consistent, accurate lead
management for any significant period. So, in
the following paragraphs we concentrate on the
common reasons for failure.
The top five reasons
for failure in lead management |
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Architecture and process |
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Discipline and execution |
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Garbage in - garbage out |
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Critical mass and focus |
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Poor systems |
| Read
on for details, or click one of the above to go
straight to the appropriate paragraph. |
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Architecture and
process |
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Lead management is not easy -
even in theory. Like any information systems
challenge you need a thorough systems analysis
and clear definitions of the concepts and terms
involved. Then you need to engineer effective
and affordable processes to implement the
design. Many lead management schemes fail
because these fundamental foundations are not in
place. Management underestimates the inherent
difficulty of lead management even more often
than they underestimate the value of it to their
bottom line. As with any business process, if
the architecture is missing, the building is
going to be ugly and non-functional. |
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Discipline and execution |
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Most sales reps are delinquent on
most of their lead management updates most of
the time! Some people try to write this off as
"human nature". But if doubling the
effectiveness of your marketing and sales
process depends on the data from lead management
then it is vital to find a way to conquer "human
nature" and have disciplined and thorough
execution. Many good management teams
tolerate levels of delinquency and informality
in lead management that they would consider
unconscionable in other business processes. |
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Garbage in - garbage
out |
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The data in most lead management
systems is of much lower quality than the data
you will find in the same companies' financial,
order entry or supply chain management systems.
This is due to the fact that most people depend
for some of the key data in their systems on
opinions of people who are too involved as
players in the process. If a company is
unfortunate enough to have a weak sales rep,
would you expect this rep to say "The leads
are great but I am screwing them up."? But
lots of organizations are allowing reps to
report "These leads are not new and of low
quality" - with little or no way of
independently assessing the objectivity of this
input. Thus, it is
unusual for lead management systems to
successfully perform one of their most important
roles - to find and fix poor sales coverage.
Equally, it is common for lead management
reports to be used to justify bad conclusions
and action plans. |
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Critical mass and focus |
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Lead management may be a vital
ingredient of success - but you don't need a lot
of it. As a result, smaller companies assign a
quarter of a person to it; even one full-time
person falls well short of critical mass for
such a complex and demanding function.
Large companies may have a
significant lead management group. But it is
still not one of the core competencies of
organization. You'll wait a long time to hear an
IT company executive say "He's one of our most
promising people. Let's put him in lead
management."
It doesn't take a Harvard
Business Review case study to prove that when a
challenging function is executed with
sub-critical resource or is outside of your core
competencies you should not expect best-of-breed
execution - in fact, you should expect the
opposite. |
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Poor
systems |
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Although in total lead
management is a complex discipline, the
operational interface to the lead owners
(usually sales reps) is simple. Many companies
are operating with 'cobbler's children' lead
management systems that are far from intuitive
and easy to use. Common deficiencies include:
not available in any browser; non-intuitive
language; legacy interfaces; asks for far more
information than is needed; slow; unreliable. In
fact, many IT companies selling leading-edge
solutions would be embarrassed to show their
internal lead management system to their
prospects. Why? Once again because it is not a
core competency and so it is difficult to
justify investment in leading-edge solutions. |
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Time to get positive
If you
recognize some of the problems we describe
above, we had better have some solutions for you
- and guess what?
The
central recommendation we make is lead
management is one function that all
organizations should seriously consider
outsourcing. The following table shows
how outsourcing provides a solution to the
common reasons for lead management failure
described earlier. |
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Challenge |
How outsourcing helps |
What KMA offers |
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Architecture, process,
definitions, documentation |
You don't have to reinvent the
wheel. You can get a specialized supplier with
established processes and a track record. |
A proven process that has managed
thousands of leads for some of the biggest IT
companies in the world. We were named
"best-of-breed" in an independent study of lead
management across several of the biggest IT
companies. |
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Discipline and attention to
detail in execution |
Dedicated specialists with
committed service levels and no excuses. |
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Complete, accurate and consistent
data |
Not only will you get good,
independent reports about your performance,
you'll get meaningful comparisons with how
others perform. |
To these inherent benefits we add
the best operational and analytical reports in
the business - ask for samples. |
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Critical mass, focus, range of
skills, coverage in busy periods |
The service is there 52 weeks of
the year. The depth and breadth of skills will
exceed anything that most companies could
allocate to lead management internally. |
In addition to the general
benefits of specialization, KMA provides
unparalleled levels of experience in the IBM
world. We know how to build respect with your
sales reps, how to manage your input to IBM's
PWLM and your distributor's lead management
systems and so on. |
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Providing productive, flexible
systems and keeping them up to date |
Specialized providers share the
development of their systems across many
clients. Thus, you pay a fraction of the cost of
developing or buying your own system, creating
training, maintaining and updating, ... |
We will provide you with a
secure, personalized portal. It will look like
your own system, use your own language and be
available from any browser 24/7. That's where
the reps will make their updates and where you
will get your reports. |
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Right for you?
We find that these arguments are
valid even for the biggest companies. However,
if you are a small or medium IBM BP it's a slam
dunk - because not only is it better, it's also
lower cost. |
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What is the cost?
We provide cradle-to-grave lead
management for our clients for a total cost of
$30 to $60 per lead. The average big-ticket IT
lead is open for six months. So, if you have:
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20
new leads a week (1,000 per year) you will
typically have 500 open leads that need
management. We can manage them for you for
between $30,000 and $60,000 per year. That's
much less than the total cost of one person
with average skills - without mentioning the
cost of maintaining your systems. How is one
person going to keep up with 500 open leads
- especially when they are sick or on
vacation? |
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2
new leads a week (100 per year) you will
typically have 50 open leads that need
management. We can manage them for you for
between $3,000 and $6,000 per year. That's
the cost of a relatively unskilled person
for five hours per week. |
"But",
we hear you cry "It's still cost I can't
afford." We beg to differ. Good lead
management will repay itself many times over by:
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Giving you the management information to
eliminate low-quality lead sources. |
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Identifying the weak links in your marketing
and sales cycle. |
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Providing the ROI data vital to proper
management of your marketing budgets. |
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Reducing the time and money wasted on poor
marketing of poor leads. |
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Finding out why you win some deals and why
you lose others. |
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Increasing the productivity and win rates of
your sales function. |
That's
why we say - whatever is broken, fix lead
management first.
Click here to contact us for a free marketing
clinic to apply these ideas to your specific
situation. |
